PALMER — The U.S. Mint is rolling out the Alaska quarter in style Friday at the Alaska State Fair.

“It’s going to be a historic day for Alaska,” said Andy Brunhart, deputy director of the mint in Washington, D.C.

The quarter’s design was selected by Gov. Sarah Palin from four ideas sent her from a specially convened coin commission and features the image of a grizzly bear with a salmon in its mouth emerging from a river. It also has the North Star and the words “The Great Land,” “Alaska” and “1959.” “We’ll be pouring the coins and handing them out,” Brunhart. “It’s not a four-hour ceremony. It goes very nicely and people just get a huge thrill out of it.”

Brunhart should know. Although he’s only been with the mint three months, he’s been to two coin rollouts; Arizona’s state quarter ceremony and one for the Andrew Jackson dollar coin in the presidents series. In November, he’ll likely be in Hawaii to roll out the last of the 50 state coins.

Joining him at the fair on Friday will be Palin, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Mat-Su Borough Mayor Curt Menard. The ceremony begins at 1 p.m. on the Colony Stage.

As a run-up to the event, there will be a coin forum on Thursday at the Alaska Heritage Museum on Northern Lights Boulevard in Anchorage. There, avid and hobby coin collectors can gather.

“It’s primarily numismatists,” Brunhart said of coin enthusiasts, adding they’ll have a chance to ask all kinds of questions about coins rare and common, new and old.

Brunhart said Friday’s Alaska state quarter rollout will be ceremonial — the quarters are, at least in theory, already in circulation.

“But it takes a week or two, closer to two weeks, for the quarters to get from the federal reserve system to the banks,” Brunhart said.

Which means Friday might well be the first time Alaskans get a chance to lay hands on the quarters.

And quarters will abound.

Brunhart said the U.S. Mint is planning to have nearly 2,000 available to hand out for free to each child under age 18. That’s in addition to the rolls personnel will have on hand for adults, who will be able to exchange $10 for $10 worth of Alaska quarters.

If rollouts for other state quarters are any indication, fair-goers shouldn’t worry too much about not being able to get their hands on one, Brunhart said. Though the mint doesn’t have a policy of flooding the state with the coins, in practice it ends up working out that way.

“When people go to their banks and say, ‘Where’s my state quarter?’ the banks order them from the Federal Reserve,” Brunhart said.

Brunhart said he thinks the Alaska quarter is particularly good, symbolizing the state’s natural beauty and abundant resources.

“I think it’s fantastic,” he said of the grizzly bear design. “But, of course, I spent over a year in Pt. Barrow, so I have a particular affinity for the state of Alaska.”

Brunhart was stationed there with the U.S. Navy at a research lab in 1976.

“It was [an] absolutely fantastic, irreplaceable life experience,” he said of his Alaska stint.

    

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.